Mass Effect is an action
RPG (role playing game) developed by BioWare and released in November of 2007
for the X-Box 360. A PC version was released in March of 2008. It is the first
in what will be a trilogy series with the second installment expected out
sometime in 2009. It is a single player game with no option for co-op play.

The game took the gaming community by
storm as it was one of those games that could appeal to both RPG gamers and FPS
(first person shooter) gamers because it combined the best of both worlds. The
game won many notable awards and consistently received high marks from the
gaming community. But its success was not without criticism due to its mature
content. The game was, appropriately, given a Mature Rating in the United States
for Blood, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, and Violence.

What is 'mass effect'? According to
the game's Project Director, Casey Hudson, it's a term that was coined for the
game based on what real physicists are referring to as 'dark energy'. It is
phenomenon that has properties similar to gravity and electromagnetism. In the
game, humans have recently learned to harness the powers of this mass effect
phenomenon, and the humans who have learned to manipulate it with the aid of
implants, are referred to as biotics.

The Game:

The game starts the player
off with the choice to choose the generic quick-start character or the option to
create your own character. What appealed to me right off the bat is that BioWare
realized that there are a lot of us girls out there gaming now and they give you
a choice to choose between a male or a female character. If you decide to create
your own character, you have the freedom to manipulate their entire facial
structure, skin tone, hair pigmentation, and eye color. Your can give your
character a first name, however, your designation is Commander Shepard and
regardless to whether you are male, you will be referred to either by rank or
just as 'Shepard' through out the game.

The basics of game play involve
choosing what kind of upbringing, military background, and specialties your
character will have. These choices will affect your skill with weapons and armor
abilities, your biotic abilities and your tech abilities. They can also be good
indicators as to how you will emotionally play out your character. That is one
freedom you have in this game that appeals to many players: the choice to be
nice and charming or the choice to intimidate and bully your way through the
game.

With each mission you are also
assigned two teammates and you can choose to either let them be their own
independent people and use their biotic abilities on their own, for defense
only, or you control them completely. You can also control their movements
during a firefight to help keep them out of harm's way or take the heat off you
if need be.

As you wander around, you can choose
to take up side missions for money and XP's, and you gain XP's by chatting with
people and learning more info on various races, worlds, etc. Leveling up is
achieved by both exploration and use of tech, biotic and weapons abilities.
Another freedom the player is given is to let the computer auto-level you up
according to the skills you have just used, or to control your leveling
distribution.

As the game progresses and you gain
more money, you can buy better weapons, upgrades, ammo and armor for you and
your team. It should be noted that the further into the game you get however,
your explorations should lead you across many weapons lockers and so forth that
will provide you with many of these upgrades for free should you or one of your
teammates possess the proper level of decryption and electrical skill to open
locked items.

The game is story driven, weaving
many themes and plots together, culminating in the big battle at the end. Out of
the box, the game has levels from noob to veteran. Beating either normal or
veteran will unlock the Hardcore level and then beating that will unlock the
Insanity level. There are 45 Achievements to be had on Mass Effect,
several of them revolving around completing the game on the harder levels and
then completing it twice through.

The Story:

The year is 2183A.D.
Thirty-five years earlier, human colonists on Mars came across advanced
technology left behind by a race known as the Protheans. The Protheans were
wiped out centuries before by an unknown force, but their technology is spread
through the universe, and such technology is what allows humanity to finally
travel outside of our solar system and start exploring and colonizing further
around the Milky Way.

The game starts you as a Commander
aboard the SSV Normandy, a prototype ship built in joint effort by Humans and
Turians. You immediately are given a feel for the fact that humanity still has a
great deal of mistrust and animosity towards the other alien races, because they
feel that the Council, who governs the whole galaxy, is holding humanity back
and denying them certain privileges.

One such privilege is to be a Spectre.
Spectres are the long arm of the Council. They are not bound by any laws, and
can use any means necessary to do the bidding of the Council in their efforts to
maintain peace throughout the galaxy. What is supposed to be just a shake-down
run for the ship and crew, turns out to be an audition for you. A Spectre is
aboard your ship to take you on a secret mission to recover a working Prothean
beacon, so he can see you in action because your name has been put forward to
become the first human Spectre.

But the mission goes horribly wrong
when a massive ship lands on the world before your ship gets there and a horde
of Geth (machine like creatures) devastate the colony. The Spectre assigned to
you, Nihlus, is murdered during the mission by one of his own: another Turian
Spectre known as Saren who has obviously gone rogue.

Before you leave the world, you are
exposed to the message contained in the beacon, which infuses graphic and
confusing images into your mind before self-destructing. You wake up back on
board the Normandy and thus your journey begins. You and your companions must
first fight to make the Council see that Saren is a traitor and in the process,
you add a few more aliens to your team. Once you expose Saren and prove your
worth before the Council, you are made a Spectre and set loose on the galaxy
with the Normandy as your ship.

You travel the galaxy to find Dr.
Liara T'Soni, the daughter of Matriarch Benezia, who is a powerful Asari
believed to be the right hand of Saren. Once you have T'Soni , your intrepid
crew explores the Traverse to accomplish side mission (should you choose to do
so), and track down clues as to what Saren is really up to and put a stop to it.

One of the subplots is romantic in
nature, and you can find yourself caught in the middle of a love-triangle
depending on the conversational choices you make with certain characters as the
game progresses. If you are a female, you can have the choice between the female
character Liara T'Soni or the male Lt. Kadian Alenko. If you are a male, you are
given the choice between Chief Ashley Williams and Liara T'Soni. This particular
subplot came under the most criticism from religious advocates for not only
including a choice that allowed sex between two women, but the scene, regardless
of who the participants were, was rather revealing. Your outcome for this
decision however, can be affected by a choice you have to make just a little
prior to that when you are forced with the decision to sacrifice a team member
on one of the final missions.

You finally catch up with Saren, and
find out that his massive warship is really a Reaper. The Reapers are an ancient
race of malevolent beings that were the responsible for wiping out not only the
Protheans, but all life in the galaxy time and again over the eons. Think The Matrix meets Battlestar Galactica's’
Cylon race. The ship calls
itself Sovereign and it is merely a sentinel- but his capabilities and mission
could be the undoing of humanity and the Council races alike.

It is up to you and your crew to
decipher what you saw in the message from the Prothean beacon- for that is the
key- and using that knowledge to stop Saren and Sovereign.

My Opinion:

This game absolutely
ROCKED! Again, RPG's aren't my favorite, but this was another game that had
enough action and an in-depth storyline that caught my attention immediately. I
am also a sucker for any game that allows you the 'good vs. evil' approach to
things. And let me tell you, some of the Renegade approaches were just outright
hilarious if not a little rude or brutal.

It took me a little while to get used
to the controls and as you leveled up you added more tech or biotic abilities to
each of your characters to control. I had to play with it a little bit to
determine what worked best with the enemy I was facing as some abilities worked
well, while others were simply ineffective. Overall, I thought the characters
were pretty responsive, and the aiming controls for all weapons were realistic
(if not a bit frustrating at times), with stabilization and accuracy improving
with experience and upgrades. The only real controller issues I had were with
the tank-like Mako. Granted it's virtually impossible to flip it and it
self-rights even if you do, plus it's fairly durable and can crawl up some
amazingly steep slopes. But it's a nightmare to drive, especially on rocky and
uneven surfaces. For anyone who has played Halo, it makes the Warthog's
performance look spectacular. The Mako is squirrelly, difficult to maneuver in
tight quarters, and has a clunky close-up sighting system.

I was engrossed in the characters,
their own back-stories, and the Mass Effect world as a whole. The game
made me think, and not just in side-mission exploration parts. Every step of the
way you have to make choices that could effect the outcome of the mission and
your effectiveness in a battle. During my first play through, I found myself
constantly forgetting to change the types of bullets or upgrades I had in my
weapons, thereby making them less effective against the enemy I was up against.
By my second time through the game, I had finally learned to constantly recheck
and gear up everyone's inventory before we went out on any kind of mission.

The graphics were pretty clean with
all sceneries and structurals (ships, building etc.) In fact there is one point
where I was driving around on the moon and climbed up this little hill and was
looking up at Earth. I actually paused or a moment because the picture was
absolutely amazing and beautiful. The Aliens were nicely designed as well, but I
found the humans in the cut-scenes to be a little rough. Nothing so terrible
that it turned me off to the game. The only real complaints I have for the game
are small actually: the loading times are a bit long, there is no co-op feature,
and the elevator rides! Seriously, humanity can jump from one end of the galaxy
to the other and yet it takes forever to ride in a friggin' elevator? My great
grandmother could climb the stairs faster than it takes for you to ride from one
floor to the next. What's worse, is you are subjected to annoying news clips,
pointless chatter amongst your teammates, or the ultimate torture....the cheesy
elevator muzak. The loading times and no co-op I can handle, but I sincerely
hope BioWare does away with the horrific elevator rides players were subjected
to in this first game.

The
soundtrack was also very well
done. Lots of sweeping synth-filled arrangements that were appropriately
haunting throughout the game. It was perfect for a sci-fi based, military-styled
game. Two of my favorite pieces were, From the Wreckage and the
Love Theme. From the Wreckage was just absolutely beautiful for
the cut-scene it was used in, truly capturing every emotion of that whole
moment. And while the Love Theme is used during some of the more
romantic cut-scenes, it is just haunting enough to be used in a few of the other
more solemn moments as well. A very versatile piece indeed. The romantic subplot
was a good addition to the storyline, and I liked the little wicked twists they
threw into it. I will even admit that the 'skin scene' was pretty hot, but
yeah....I can see why it raised the ire of some folks. Hence the need to limit
sale of the game to adults only. The game was challenging on many fronts and
really pulled me into the story. There are a lot of themes and issues that are
addressed in the game too. One of the primary ones is being able to overcoming
prejudices to work together to defeat a common enemy. It was a theme I felt was
very appropriate given the state of the world these days.

The game ends with you defeating
Saren and Sovereign of course, but Sovereign was just one ship of an entire race
of Reapers. They’re out there, beyond the borders of the Travers, lying dormant
as they have for thousands of years until the time was right to wage war on all
life in the galaxy. The battle was won, but the war is obviously just about to
begin. BioWare is currently developing the second installment to the Mass
Effect trilogy, which should be due out some time in 2009. It is another
sequel I am looking forward to with great anticipation. Overall, it is one of my
favorite games and definitely worthy of several replays to get all the
achievements. If you haven't played it yet: Go buy it. Now.